Rethinking Class Rank

From time to time, I write for a national blog on competency-based  grading. You can visit that blog at this link: www.competencyworks.org.

Here is the most recent post I made on that blog:

My school, Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston, NH, made the shift to a competency-based grading and reporting system about three years ago. For those of you who have recently made the switch, as well as those of you who are planning one in the near future, I can tell you that once you go down the “competency road” it creates a chain reaction of other proposed changes – some you would anticipate, some you would not.

For us, we weren’t too far down the path before the question came up of what we should do about class rank. Like most traditional high schools, we have always used a weighted grade point average (G.P.A.) to compute our class rank. We also have always engaged in traditions such as holding a banquet for students who were ranked in the top ten percent of the graduating class and naming a Valedictorian, Salutatorian, and a Class Essayist to the students who were ranked 1, 2, and 3 respectively in their graduating class. With the shift to a competency-based system, we hoped to remove the tradition of class rank. We found that this would prove harder to do than we originally thought.

The philosophy behind ranking students based on an index such as a GPA is flawed with a competency-based model. Imagine telling this to your incoming freshman class on the first day of school: “Dear students, we have a special tradition of holding a banquet to celebrate those of you who will graduate in the top ten percent of your class. No matter how hard each of you work to master both the school-wide and course-based competencies at our school, ninety percent of you will never have the option to attend this banquet.” This makes no sense, and it is even a little depressing. Furthermore, it just isn’t fair. Why not instead set a bar that you will use to distinguish an “honor graduate”, and any student who is able to reach (or exceed) that bar gets the distinction at graduation. From year to year, the number of honor graduates will change, but the standard never would. Every student would have the opportunity to be considered an honor graduate, provided they meet the requirements.

Last Spring, our school had the opportunity to make a joint presentation with Spaulding High School in Rochester, NH about competency-based grading to representatives from the admissions offices of every single private and public college and university in New Hampshire (only Dartmouth couldn’t make it that day). We hoped to walk away from this meeting with a blessing from the colleges to move away from the class ranking systems that we were currently using, but that was not the case. Although the admissions officers understood and appreciated our position about rank, they explained that it was still a necessary component of their admissions process. Without giving away all of their secrets, they told us that they keep data on how our kids who have enrolled at their school have done over the last ten years, and that information is used when determining which applicants to select from our school. Class rank is a common denominator that helps them compare our students against each other, not necessarily against other schools.

So, despite our best efforts, we continue to operate with a traditional class ranking system at Sanborn, although we do try to impress upon students and parents that class rank is only one piece to a portfolio of information that gets considered by colleges. Perhaps it will take this movement getting a little bit larger before higher education institutions will join us in recognizing that ranking students has no place in a competency-based system.